Trying Out Ubuntu 17.10 On A Laptop One Month Ahead Of Release

There will be plenty of Ubuntu 17.10 benchmarking around the Artful Aardvark's official release, but for now is just this quick comparison using the Razer Blade Stealth laptop. Here's a comparison of the stock Ubuntu 17.04 environment compared to Ubuntu 17.10 at its current stage, one month ahead of the official release. Keep in mind the Linux 4.13 kernel still should be landing as well as the stable point releases to Mesa 17.2, but the GNOME Shell 3.26 / GCC 7.2 is locked in and other key packages.

For those wondering how the RAM usage compares on this Kabylake laptop when freshly booting up the respective stock environment under 17.04 and 17.10:

The memory usage under Ubuntu 17.10 was around 100MB lower than found with Ubuntu 17.04. It could be GNOME Shell using less memory than Unity, Wayland vs. X.Org impact, or a variety of other factors at play. But nice to see the RAM desktop while idling on a fresh boot of Ubuntu 17.10 coming in lower than 17.04.

But the battery power usage at idle following a fresh boot is higher under Ubuntu 17.10... This though may be due to differences in the default power management or other matters. As well, Ubuntu 17.10 isn't yet on Linux 4.13 so the power numbers are still likely to change and will also be different depending upon your hardware.

Ubuntu 17.10 as of today is booting slower than Ubuntu 17.04 on this Intel laptop...

The newer kernel is actually booting faster with 17.10.

And the loader/firmware stages clock in basically the same, as would be expected.

But it appears the userspace / GNOME Shell is what's currently taking much longer to load on this Intel Kabylake system compared to Ubuntu 17.10. We'll see how these numbers evolve before the official 17.10 AA debut.